6

I was going over the children's drawings that I had painted throughout the course on my desk with my black marker. I had no interest whatsoever in what Miss Wood might have to tell us about numbers or equations. Nora, beside me, kept jotting things down in her notebook; of course, she liked math, but I had been failing at it for years, and I doubted this year would be any different.

"Do you want to at least pretend you're doing something productive, girl?" Nora glanced at my empty desk when the teacher paused to address a question. "Damn, you haven't even taken out your pencil case, lazy ass."

"This teacher has it out for me. I hate this school, and even more so this subject."

I really hated it, and I had reasons: 1) the uniform was ugly, hideous, dreadful, and painful to look at; 2) the colors green and mustard yellow were the most accurate combination to represent how crappy the school itself was; 3) the football team was a bunch of jocks who kept studying because of their parents'